Coronavirus now number one cause of death across the US as it overtakes cancer and heart disease, says doctor

CORONAVIRUS is now the biggest cause of death in the US – killing more people on average than cancer or heart disease.

Covid-19 is the cause of 1,970 deaths per day in the country, according to figures published earlier this week by Dr Maria Danilychev, based in San Diego, California.

3

A doctor assembles a ventilator at Javits New York Medical StationCredit: EPA

The figures show 1,774 deaths a day are caused by heart disease while another 1,641 are due to cancer, Newsweek has reported.

Fatalities from coronavirus surpassed 16,600 by the end of Thursday, an increase of more than 12,000 deaths from data posted by Johns Hopkins University just eight days earlier.

On Tuesday 1,939 people in the US died from the coronavirus, the highest single-day total for any country since the virus was first detected in China towards the end of last year.

The figures, compiled from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Worldmeters.info, showed Covid-19 as the third leading cause of death just last week with, on average, 975 deaths a day.

Dr.James Lawler, a public health researcher at the University of Nebraska, estimated in mid-March that 480,000 deaths were a possibility if the infection and death rates stayed consistent at 30 and 0.5 percent, according to The New York Times.

New York has seen more than 161,000 coronavirus cases, with deaths in the state surpassing 7,000 on Thursday.

New York City, the epicenter for the outbreak in the US, saw its death toll rise past 5,000 on Thursday. The virus has now killed more than 2,000 more people than the number who died on 9/11.